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Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Who Has Their Hand in The Cookie Jar?

Why Alabama cities need (and encourage) crime

Blogger Comments: This is happening all over the state. Politicians/Sheriff's getting rich of the taxpayers in Alabama. The Sheriff of Morgan County has not released any of her Financial records from the pistol permit funds, the inmate food funds (which she stole $160k from and invested into her convicted felons cousin shady car dealership), nor any other funds for that matter.The only ones she has released have been fuzzy math.

I
credit Hub Harrington with healing my blindness. He didn’t lay on
hands. He didn’t operate. He just did his job and the scales fell from
my eyes.

I can see! I can see!

I
can see that justice should not be a get-rich-quick scheme, that
squeezing poor defendants beyond their ability to pay, and shackling
them to a court system more interested in profit than rights, is
fundamentally unAmerican.

Harrington, a now-retired judge from Shelby County, ruled in a Harpersville case involving
blatant misuse of the justice system to churn profits for the city and
for a private probation company. He put it in words Alabama could
understand. It was a debtor’s prison, he wrote in his 2012 ruling. It
snubbed almost every safeguard afforded by the U.S. Constitution and
stood as an obstacle to life, liberty and the pursuit of that stuff we
claim to stand for.

It looked, for a minute,
like Alabama saw the light. And the darkness that comes from turning
cops and courts into bill collectors.

But we’re
still in the dark. Still criminalizing people for their inability to pay
and treating our own citizens differently – as a matter of policy –
when they’re broke.

The findings were stark. Alabama’s courts do not prevent or deter crime. They encourage it.

Courts
are paying the bills because politicians are too scared to properly
fund government. They force the justice system to come up with its own
money. So of course the cost is passed along to offenders.

Cops
and courts become dependent on the money to operate.

Blogger Comments: Sheriff Ana Franklin of Morgan County knows all about making money, stealing money, building mansions.

Cities need
criminals to run in the black. Police are incentivized not just to write
tickets but to prosecute.

Every time a $35 bail bond fee is issued, for instance, three fourths of the money goes straight back to law enforcement.

But
that’s not all. Of the millions in court costs and fines levied each
year, most is sent to state and local general funds and other agencies
that come to rely on it.

This is not justice. It’s business. With a badge.

Of
course if you get a ticket and have money to pay it’s no big deal. You
move on and call it the cost of a mistake. But if you don’t have cash to
pay you’re strung along paying high fines and fees to a creditor who
can put you in jail.

The authors of the report
interviewed 980 Alabamians who were caught up in that system. Most said
they gave up food or rent or medical care or child support to pay off
those fines, and 40 percent – four out of 10 – admitted committing more
crimes to pay it off.

They
commit crimes to pay fines. And 20 percent of those whose only other
crimes were traffic offenses said they committed more serious offenses
to pay their traffic tickets. We’re talking bad checks, selling drugs,
robbery.

In the name of justice.

We cannot even fathom the damage it does. It makes people fear and distrust police officers, who are put in a terrible position.

It criminalizes people who aren’t criminals, clogs the courts and takes time from real policing. The report cites a national study that shows courts relying heavily on court debt solved crimes at a lower rate.

This is not justice. It is the opposite of it, disguised by a badge and a robe and a gavel.

It’s time, Alabama, to see the light.

John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for Reckon by AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.